Faster Performance

Network optimizations for optimal performanceAmazon CloudFront is continuously measuring internet connectivity, performance and computing to find the best way to route requests to our network; taking into account performance, load, operational status, and other factors to deliver the best experience in real-time. Amazon CloudFront is also running on the AWS global network backbone, that allows for efficient transmission of requests between the CloudFront Edge locations and otherAWS services, across regions and applications. Network-layer optimizations such as TCP fast open, request collapsing, keep-alive connections and much more, enable the Amazon CDN to accelerate both static and dynamic content for improved user performance.

Dynamic or static contentModern websites and applications are a rich mixture of dynamic, personalized and static content. Microservices also expose increasing numbers of APIs and requests between components. Amazon CloudFront is optimized for both, providing extensive flexibility for optimizing cache behavior, coupled with network-layer optimizations for latency and throughput. CloudFront supports the following HTTP methods: GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, and PATCH. This means you can improve the performance of dynamic websites that have web forms, comment and login boxes, “add to cart” buttons or other features that upload data from end users. It also means you can now use a single domain name to deliver your whole website through CloudFront thereby accelerating both the download and upload parts of your website.

Large libraries and media assetsAs the global network infrastructure has grown and improved, cache retention has emerged as a key contributor to performance. The content delivery network (CDN) is architected to keep objects longer in cache and to reduce cache churn. Techniques like tiered caching and de-duplication optimization of objects in cache help maximize cache retention.

Security

Protection against Network and Application Layer AttacksAmazon CloudFront, AWS Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), and Amazon Route 53 work seamlessly together to create a flexible, layered security perimeter against multiple types of attacks including network and application layer DDoS attacks. All of these services are co-resident at the AWS edge and provide a scalable, reliable, and high-performance security perimeter for your applications and content. With CloudFront as the “front door” to your application and infrastructure, you are moving the primary attack surface away from your critical content, data, code and infrastructure. Learn more about AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency.

Access Control With Amazon CloudFront, you can restrict access to your content through a number of capabilities. With Signed URLs and Signed Cookies, you can support Token Authentication to restrict access to only authenticated viewers. Through geo-restriction capability, you can prevent users in specific geographic locations from accessing content that you're distributing through CloudFront. With Origin Access Identity (OAI) feature, you can restrict access to an Amazon S3 bucket to only be accessible from CloudFront. Learn more.

Programmable and DevOps Friendly

Full-featured APIs and DevOps ToolsAmazon CloudFront provides developers with a full-featured API to create, configure and maintain your CloudFront distributions. In addition, developers have access to a number of tools such as AWS CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, CodeCommit and AWS SDKs to configure and deploy their workloads with Amazon CloudFront.

Edge behaviorsYour CloudFront Distribution can be configured with multiple behaviors which govern how CloudFront will process your request and what features will be applied. Take control of how CloudFront caches, how CloudFront communicates with your origin, customize what headers and metadata are forwarded to your origin, create content variants with flexible cache-key manipulation, support for various compression modes, and other customizations. With built-in device detection, CloudFront can detect the device type (Desktop, Tablet, Smart TV, or Mobile device) and pass that information in the form of new HTTP Headers to your application to easily adapt content variants or other responses. Amazon CloudFront can also detect the country-level location of the requesting user for further customization of the response.

Lambda@Edge

Lambda@Edge helps web developers, mobile developers and Amazon CloudFront customers run their code closer to their users. Using Lambda@Edge allows you to respond to requests at the lowest latency across AWS locations globally. For web or mobile requests, the compute request from your users can be delivered closer to them, improving their overall experience. You pay only for the compute time you use. There is no charge when your code is not running. Learn more. >>

Cost Effective

Pay-as-you-go publicly available pricing and committed-traffic private pricing With Amazon CloudFront pay-as-you-go pricing, you pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. For customers who are willing to make certain minimum traffic commitments, we also offer private committed pricing.Learn more about Amazon CloudFront pricing.

Free data Transfer between AWS cloud services and Amazon CloudFront If you use AWS origins such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 or Elastic Load Balancing, you don’t pay for any data transferred between these services and CloudFront.

As part of the AWS Free Usage Tier, you can get started with Amazon CloudFront for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 50 GB Data Transfer Out and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS Requests each month for one year.